Dalton Rand
Dalton Rand is a grifter who poses as a psychic, to con people out of their money. Background Dalton Rand is a con artist and a fraudulent psychic in Boston, USA. He has taken advantage of hundreds of people, maybe thousands with his act. He runs both an office where people can come and see him and also a cable TV show. The studio where he hosts his cable TV show is surrounded by warehouses and storage lockers. It is local cable access as he is self-financing but he is trying to score a bigger payday from a network. It is expensive to run but serves as good advertising for his office. Before the show, he performs a hot read where he gets himself armed with as much information as possible to help him with the readings. He doesn’t know who will be in the audience ahead of time but he doesn’t really need to know until they are there. He has cameras all over the place hoping to pick up something that will help him in the readings. He also has a plant, an assistant of his, who stands in line and pretends to be part of the audience. This person then feeds him the information about the readings in his ear using Earbuds. There are 20 hidden microphones taped to chairs in the audience as well. Then once the show starts he cold reads people to gather more information and he is a master at it. Cold reading is a technique often used by mentalists, fortune tellers, psychics, and mediums to determine details about another person in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than he or she actually does. Even without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by carefully analyzing the person's body language, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. He just asks questions and uses the target’s answers to guide him. It doesn’t matter if they don’t actually say anything back, they don’t need to, he just reads their body language to see if he is on the right track such as the furrowing of an eyebrow, a widening of the eyes, an opening of the mouth, if breathing changes, if the shoulders are raised or slouched, how they hold their hands, if their lips are pursed, etc. This combined with the hot read makes Dalton a very convincing psychic. One pregnant woman went to his office to get in contact with her dead husband. He had his assistant check to see if she was on any social networking sites and then used the information on her facebook page such as the name of her dog being Brutus, to convince her he was in touch with her husband. He ran a credit check on her as well to work out how many times she could come back and pay his fee before she balked. He took every penny from her husband Mike’s life insurance policy and was quite prepared for her to sell her house in order to pay him. In his words “Never leave money on the table.” The woman’s baby was due to be born two months later and he didn’t care. Appearances Season 2 * "The Future Job" Notes * Dalton Rand is played by actor Luke Perry. Rand Rand